Anthropic enters the enterprise chat
Today: Anthropic throws its hat in the enterprise AI ring, AT&T has had it with Broadcom's changes to VMware licensing, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
Today: why enterprise vendor promises to indemnify customers against AI lawsuits could be easier said than done, an insider's view on AWS at a crossroads, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
Welcome to Runtime! Happy New Year! Today: why enterprise vendor promises to indemnify customers against AI lawsuits could be easier said than done, an insider's view on AWS at a crossroads, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
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Over the last six months, major enterprise tech vendors hoping to spur adoption of their expensive new tools have promised customers that they will indemnify them against any legal claims raised by the output produced by those tools. But generative AI is not an ordinary enterprise tech product.
Most generative AI foundation models were trained on a huge swath of content ingested from the internet, and a lot of that content could be protected by copyright law. Last week The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI for using its content to train the groundbreaking ChatGPT service, a case that seems likely to test the boundaries of copyright law in the 21st century.
Enterprise generative AI services rely on a series of filters and controls to help their customers avoid using anything legally dubious in their output.
Many of these indemnification clauses have loopholes large enough to drive a truck through, said Kate Downing, a lawyer who has written critically about GitHub's indemnification policies for Copilot, in a recent interview.
This is very new territory for the legal system and it's far from clear where the law will settle a few years down the road.
Read the full story on Runtime here.
In the weeks following AWS re:Invent 2023, it was not hard to notice that a significant number of well-known AWS employees announced plans to leave the company. According to a blog post last week from AWS's Justin Garrison, a senior developer advocate, the company's return-to-office policy was the breaking point for a lot of his colleagues.
"In my small sphere of people there wasn’t a single person under an L7 that didn’t want out," Garrison said, referring to a relatively senior level in the internal hierarchy of AWS employees. In his view, this was a deliberate move by Amazon leadership to cut headcount without resorting to layoffs, and it appears to have worked.
But while return-to-office mandates have rippled through many enterprise tech companies, Garrison's post also pointed to deeper problems he sees within AWS. "Amazon has shifted from a leader to a follower. From my perspective it’s not going well," he wrote, also predicting that there will be "a major AWS outage in 2024" because of all the institutional knowledge that is walking out the door.
Canva is preparing an equity event that would allow employees to sell shares at a valuation of $26 billion, according to the Information, although it wouldn't raise any new funds itself as part of that deal.
2023 was one of the best years for tech stocks in recent memory, thanks in large part to Nvidia's surge atop the generative AI boom.
Oracle Cerner's troubled modernization project with the VA remains a headache, according to NextGov.
Salesforce acquired Spiff, a commission-tracking startup it had previously funded, to close out a year in which it really scaled down its M&A activity to focus on its core business.
Keeping track of all the Copilots rolled out by Microsoft last year is a difficult task, but Directions on Microsoft has you covered.
Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!